© Vicki Elson
A baby born in a tree!
A baby beamed out of her mother’s body!
A baby born to Arnold Schwarzenegger!
I’ve looked at hundreds of TV and movie birth scenes to discover exactly how the mass media distorts birth. I found that Hollywood routinely exaggerates fear, danger, and speed, like in this common motif: the minute a pregnant woman’s water breaks, there’s a mad rush to the hospital. Cars screech around corners and run over pedestrians, or, worse, they get stuck in traffic.
None of this would matter if it didn’t accumulate in our subconscious minds, affecting the way we feel about labor when it’s our turn to have babies. But a lifetime of exposure does indeed seep into us. That can affect our minds and even our bodies during pregnancy and birth.
Hollywood makes women look silly, nutty, desperate. Moms look helpless and in need of immediate rescue. The scariest birth scene ever was an episode of “E.R.” directed by Mimi Leder. A loveable woman who wanted natural childbirth soon discovered, like many TV moms, that her body was unreliable. But her doctors were even worse. With an insanely unrealistic set of medical mistakes, they managed to, um, kill her. That one was a double whammy for the pregnant women who made the mistake of watching it. It won an Emmy.
Hollywood takes footage of a normal birth and adds a gratuitously terrifying narrator: “The most DANGEROUS journey in life…the four-inch trip… DOWN the birth canal!” and “Here on a classroom floor…a lot can go wrong!”
I even heard about a mom who gave birth squatting, but the reality-show camera crew didn’t make it in time. So they made her re-enact the birth — lying flat on her back, working against gravity and sound physiological positioning, just because that’s what the director thought audiences should see.
But the laboring mother isn’t always the star of the show. Her partner often upstages her with the rough time he’s having. He (it’s always a he, except for once that I know of on “Friends”) gets his fingers bitten or crushed by the laboring mom. Or she threatens to do an instant vasectomy, or she jams his video camera into his eye. Sometimes, his struggle to get to the hospital on time is the focus of the episode — say, crawling through ventilation ducts with Bruce Willis.
When ordinary natural normal childbirth does make it onto the screen, it’s in the olden days – say, a Native or a pioneer woman. Or it’s a wacky woman giving birth in a remote lagoon, or swimming with dolphins. Or it’s an alien lady enjoying painless, sweat-free reproduction with her android pals looking on.
How can pregnant people de-program themselves and cultivate healthy, realistic expectations?
Be careful what you expose yourself to. Online births can be inspiring, or terrifying, or just plain stupid (a college student “birthing” a basketball might light up your search engine).
Fill yourself up with confidence-building imagery and information. Take a childbirth class. Watch “Birth Day,” a short film that captures midwife Naoli Vinaver Lopez’s robust grace and joy as she herself gives birth. Read informative, honest books like Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Newborn by Penny Simkin, or the excellent new Pregnancy & Birth Edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the treasured fear-buster, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by the pioneering midwife Ina May Gaskin.
“Laboring Under An Illusion: Mass Media Childbirth vs. The Real Thing” is a film I made for just this purpose, juxtaposing 100 TV and movie births with real births, so you can judge for yourself what’s realistic and what you might want for your own birth. It’s pretty funny, and it’s got lots of clips from filmmakers whose mission is to inspire and encourage you. You might find that you want to see those films in their entirety. See the trailer at www.birth-media.com.
I’m alarmed to discover that my film is being well-received all over the world. It won a couple of awards here in the USA, which delighted me, but why do I get fan mail from places like Singapore and South Africa? Apparently, we are exporting our culture so far and wide that my critique of mass media is relevant all over the place.
I suppose Hollywood might wake up and stop scaring the daylights out of pregnant women. In case they care, I launched “Reel Childbirth,” a script consultancy to help them out. But I’m not holding my breath. It’s up to pregnant women and those who love them to balance distorted media with responsible information.
Go find people who are not afraid of labor. Find people who have had labors they feel good about, and find out what they know. Soak up their wisdom, and turn off the TV!
Now! Enter to win your own copy of the DVD “Laboring Under An Illusion: Mass Media Childbirth vs. The Real Thing”, regularly $19.95.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone off about this topic! Shows like “Baby Story” are just as awful in their predictability: Couple is excited for baby, they go to hospital, mom looks miserable on her back in bed, they give her drugs, many hours pass and she looks even more miserable, many times we veer to the OR, but in the end “It wasn’t what we planned but we got our baby so it’s OK!” Over and over. It is so nutty. Real birth is not screaming down a hallway in a wheelchair, and baby won’t fall out within a minute of “Honey, it’s time!” Definitely sharing your article with my doula clients! –Chanel
Before I got pregnant with my first and while I was pregnant with my first, I watched alot of shows like A Baby Story and it honestly scared me alot into thinking that I would need an epidural and probably a cesarean by the end of it because of how frequently they show scarey births instead of easy, calm natural births. It even influenced my decision to allow them to induce me with my first, it seemed to be the norm. I leared though that those types of shows are there for ratings not to showcase normalized birth and not to put pressure on myself because of it.
I was just thinking about this the other day as I watched “Parenthood” and watched as one of the characters gave incorrect information about not eating during labor. I’m due in September and am trying my best to surround myself with positive birth stories (which ARE out there!) Sadly you just can’t turn to TV & film for them.
@susanrohwer Yep! I watched that same episode last night and was so annoyed! That information is so out of date and so detrimental to laboring women.
@TheFeministBreeder That makes me so happy to hear! Don’t even get me started on the birth episode of “Up All Night”…..
@susanrohwer the good news is that julia broke the rules and let her eat anyway, and also said that her husband stole something for her to eat too!! so obvious that it is contrary to the needs of the mother!! why do they keep doing that to moms? its totally wrong.but even 30 some years ago, my MIL didnt go in right away because she knew they wouldnt let her eat. ;P smart lady, but still had to put up with that torture.
Since learning more about childbirth in my women’s studies program, blogs like this, and from my natural mama friends, I hate watching childbirth on television! Thank you for creating a film that tackles this issue head-on!
I’m a doula, and mom, and I find watching birth on TV so stressful. If it’s stressful for me, I can’t even imagine how stressful it must be for the families in the situation. I was really excited to hear about this film, and I’m looking forward to watching it, whenever I’m able to get a chance to.
I can’t wait to see this film – part of my doula training was to look at media representations. This stuff can go in so deep. When can I see the whole things (in the UK). Thanks for sharing this.(BTW, I seem to be getting a 404 error on the “Labouring Under An Illusion” link.)
I can’t hardly watch a television show or movie involving birth without getting mad and yelling at the screen. It makes me sad to think how many continue to be influenced by these images. =(
Movies and tv didn’t really impact me before pregnancy/labor because I knew it wasn’t true. Now seeing births in tv shows or movies just makes me mad because it’s always so high drama, intense (in a bad way) and usually there are so many interventions to ‘save’ the baby and the mom. Now, after giving birth, they just make me mad. I can’t even watch them anymore because they disgust me so.
I’m just commenting to say that I really really want this DVD. That is all.
Oh, me, too! Awesome giveaway I’m a (critical) pop culture nerd and I eat this stuff up! I hope I win!
This sounds like an awesome film! As the first of my friends and family to have a baby, I’ve been trying to UNeducate everyone in my life that real birth is not the mad rush to the hospital after your second contraction that we’re conditioned to think it is. Most of them thought I was ”crazy” for having a water birth, but hopefully every little exposure to normal birth will help change their perspectives! I loved Ricki Lake’s documentary “The Business of Being Born” and this one seems so interesting with the comparison between reality and Hollywood.
This has been on my Amazon wish list for a while now. I think it’s so important for people to see that TV Birth is not Real Life. It sets people up for false expectations and increases fear and anxiety. I’d love for more people to realize this, especially BEFORE the birth of their first child.
Such an important topic. Great work!
I’ve never actually watched good movies on childbirth, but definitely winced at many horrible childbirth scenes in tv shows and movies. I’ve gone in a pursuit of online videos of homebirths, hypnobirths, and many other alternative ways of birthing that doesn’t include compulsory, unnecessary interventions in sterile rooms. Those were more inspiring than I ever imagined.
I think I may be in the minority, because I think my media perception of childbirth positively impacted my view of childbirth. I always wanted a natural birth, but I felt a hospital setting to reassuring, because of the ease of medical intervention, in case of emergency. I liked the idea of water birth, and, being of Cherokee ancestry, I am fascinated by Native American birthing practices. In the end, my birthing was very stereotypical. I opted for the epidural, but the birth progressed too quickly to actually receive it. I was screaming, and I crossed my pain threshold and couldn’t feel the contractions when it came time to push. I had a wonderful experience, and I think the overdramatization of the media may have caused me to expect the worst, so that reality wasn’t nearly as scary. I knew my mind was overhyping, so I prepared with classes and books to calm my nerves and prepare my mind.
I have seen way too many crappy dramatizations and spoken up about them(to the point my husband and children will not watch anything about ‘normal’ birth with me), to think it does not affect women. I am a birth doula and childbirth educator and I see many women roped into the television drama of birth, thinking they have to act a certain way to give birth, when in reality they need to surrender and give up the logical part of the brain for labor to progress. When women are empowered, educated about the process, supported, honored, and loved they birth well with little intervention necessary. When women are scared, uneducated about the process, stripped of support, disrespected and treated like a problem waiting to happen, they birth with fear and complications. The fact the human body can overcome our thinking brain and still give birth at all is a testament to the act itself. Consciously letting go of their bodies(not giving up control or responsibility for them) is not only important but necessary to the process. What we see repeated from the time we are young children is what we replicate or repel from. In cultures where children see birth as a part of life, a rite of passage, women give birth themselves with a minimum of fear and intervention. The media will continue to sell what people fear, birth is a medical event in the US(and other areas also) so therefor it belongs in the drama category. If only those people knew how amazingly dramatic the natural process is. Anyone who has watched a mother stand proud and deliver her own child, acting out of instinct, knows how truly dramatic the process is, it just doesn’t fit neatly into a 30 minute show.
i dont think that birth on tv and etc affected me much at all. i know its acting, so though i thought for sure they based the events on real experience, i really doubted their ability to really show a real experience. besides that, when i was pregnant, i got lots of GOOD information that gave me power to do it naturally, on my own, on my terms.
I’m a CBE, and childbirth in the media always comes up in class. I implore my couples to turn off the tv, but to those who won’t, I ask them to at least analyze critically what they’re watching.